The Argosy — page 311: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

290 The Fay of Cuers. of the North and of the South of England, France, and Egypt. There are splendid holly trees, covered with red berries ; there are what we used to call snow-berries in England, and there are hedges of quickset and privet. Oleanders assume the dimensions of forest trees, magnolias vie with them in height, while surpassing them in beauty of form and freshness of leaf colouring. Orange trees, laden with fruit, are hemmed in by beeches, limes, elms, and every other description of forest trees. ‘The gardener had planted one large bed with the old-fashioned cockscombs of all colours, which had grown and spread and compacted themselves into a mass of verdure with bold bright flowers standing erect and bidding defiance. About the borders beneath the shrubs were lilies, violets, jonquils, narcissi, the whole compacted by single and double geraniums, which here grow like weeds. All about this garden the water was trickling in rivulets ; indeed, it struck one as too damp to be quite healthy at all seasons of the year; but one thing or the other, water or a desert, is the rule of sunny lands. Seeing a man at work in the kitchen garden, I went up to him for achat. He proved to be not only the head gardener but the only gardener of this beautiful place. Nothing is stranger than the fact that, whereas generally you must employ half a dozen or a dozen men if you want to keep a garden in first-rate order, and even then you rarely succeed, yet sometimes a single man is to be found who does more than six ordinary men, and, moreover, does it better. How the family secured the man, or how the man did the work, I know not. It was not only that he cultivated the pleasure gardens I have described, but also a large kitchen garden ; and he especially prided himself upon his greenhouse, which was being enlarged, and wherein he raised all the young plants destined to fill the flower beds. In addition to what I saw, he informed me that it was ‘de rigueur” in the establishment that every Monday morning he should place twelve large pots of blooming flowers or shrubs in his lady’s flower-stand in the salon. I begged him to keep me in memory, and if at any time he should have a son, or cousin, or see walking through the paths of the wide world another fellow like himself to stop him, catch him, hold him, and send him on to me. It would be rank treason toa family, which deals so generously with the public in opening its grounds to their view, to speak of them, their manner of life or personal affairs—therefore, of course I forbear; but the history of their chateau is public property and concerns them not at all. It would appear that the chateau has changed hands two or three times within the last century, and of one of the late owners a sad, and, alas, an “o’er true tale” is told. To her it had descended from a long line of warlike and titled ancestors, in reward of whose services to their king and country, acre had been added to acre until the estate had become a little principality, COPMIECMOOOKS CON